Unofficial news and tips about Google

October 27, 2008

New Default Groups for Google Contacts

Gmail added three new built-in contact groups. "Friends, Family, and Co-workers are groups to help you organize your contacts. You can move contacts in and out of these groups at any time. Various Google products let you share information with people in these groups. In addition, you can create a Google profile to help people in these groups keep in touch with you. They will be able to easily find your profile from various Google products."

iGoogle is one of the services that will use these groups for managing your shared activities. One size doesn't fit all, so separating your contacts could simplify the way you share and receive information.

If you don't like the new groups, the bad news is that you can't delete them. Try to ignore them, but keep in mind that they'll be useful at some point.

Google has three other default contact groups: My Contacts (manually-added contacts), Suggested Contacts (email addresses collected from your conversations) and Most Contacted (20 frequently-used email addresses). Google no longer automatically adds email addresses to My Contacts. "Only contacts that you've edited, imported or added to a group will remain in My Contacts. This will provide everyone with a clean slate and, we hope, a better point for syncing contacts with mobile devices."

I am glad to see this, and unhappy. The three groups, "Friends, Family, and Co-workers" mirror the groups offered by GrandCentral, "Friends, Family, Work, and Others."

So I am glad to see this as it suggests greater integration with GrandCentral soon. But I am unhappy to see this as these three groups aren't enough. Perhaps if it was friends, family, work, jerks, and others, but even so, I'd prefer just to come up with my own groups.

GMail's default groups don't work with auto-complete for contacts. This was very unfortunate because I used to have all my family and co-workers in my own contact groups named "Family" and "Co-workers". I figured I might as well move the contacts over to the defaults ones so that I only see one "Family" contact group instead of two. When I discovered that auto-complete didn't work I attempted to add my "Family" contact group back in and it wouldn't let me because it was a duplicate. Google, please fix auto-complete to work with default groups.

I should be more clear. When I said it the default groups don't work with auto-complete for contacts I mean that if you type "Family" in the "To" field of your GMail message it doesn't pick up the family contacts like it does with your own groups.

Upset that I don't have the option to remove the groups. What a quote: "If you don't like the new groups, the bad news is that you can't delete them. Try to ignore them, but keep in mind that they'll be useful at some point."Gmail telling me what I'll find useful at some point.

Can we please make these deletable? I have no use for a family contact group as my family consists of two different sets of contacts: my mom and her family and my dad and his family. I created my own groups for each of those contacts and therefore do not use the Family group.

There should be a labs feature that permits deactivation of unwanted default groups, which, thereafter, could be hidden. Other google products should automatically be linked and synchronized with one's choice of groups, default or user-created.

Thought I had added a comment, but it's not seen a half an hour later, so will try again.

In Google Contacts I had one entry. The 1st day deleted it as unwanted. Then had difficulties and read that it can't be deleted, so added it back. Wasn't sure of the original entry, so added it back as co-workers. I now have -- and synced just prior to this msg -- in Google Contacts no entry, in Thunderbird coworkers which returns every time it's synced, in the android it's co-workers and I can't find method to remove it.